Events
Conferences, talks & workshops for PGRs
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BCMCR Research Seminar: Gay Men, Gay Porn, and ‘Marginal’ Masculinities
December 6, 2017 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Free registration at this link
Dr João Florêncio (University of Exeter) Breeding Futures: Masculinity and the Ethics of CUMmunion in Treasure Island Media’s ‘Viral Loads’
I will look at Treasure Island Media’s porn film Viral Loads and explore its implications for thinking masculinity and community formations. I’ll claim that Viral Loads enacts a refusal of individual autonomy and bodily integrity and alludes to community formations constituted not through collective possession but through an excessive accumulation of foreign matter. In the toxic cummunities depicted in the film, the flow and exchange of ‘poz loads’ posits masculinity as multitude. In so doing, it puts forward an alternative form of cohabitation that is no longer predicated on the opposition of self and other that characterised modern Western thought.
Prof. John Mercer (BCU) – On the Edge: Baiting Culture and Popper Training Videos
This presentation discusses the practice of making collage ‘popper training’ videos which involves repurposing a range of found sources, from still images to amateur video and webcam footage to extracts from commercial gay porn, with the express purpose of turning masturbation, fuelled by amyl nitrate use, into an activity that might be regarded, using the neoliberal rubric, as ‘productive leisure’ (Gelber, 1999:2). The intention of the presentation is to contextualise this creative practice of (what I am describing for the sake of simplicity and consistency as) popperbating or popper training video making within a masturbation culture of ‘edging’ and ‘baiting’, to provide some conceptual orientations to situate the materials and for the analysis of the textual qualities of the videos, and to discuss the sexual scripting that they produce.
Charlie Sarson (BCU) – The Neighbourhood Cums: Ding-Dong! Dick’s Here!
This paper will discuss the representation of digital technologies in gay pornography as a means of (either genuinely, or for the purpose of extending a fantasy) recruiting additional men to join in with group sex, and depictions of it. In particular, this presentation will focus on the gay porn production company SketchySex, whose niche is scenes of group sex whereby members come/cum and go as they please in order to satiate the excessive need for pleasure of the passive performers, and which often features clips of performers scrolling through cruising apps on their phone in order to entice other active performers into the scene.
About the speakers:
João Florêncio is a lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. His current monograph project (forthcoming: Routledge) explores the construction of “porous masculinities” and “toxic cummunities” in contemporary gay porn.
John Mercer is Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Birmingham City University. He is the author of Gay Porn: Representations of Masculinity and Sexuality, I.B. Tauris 2017, Rock Hudson, BFI publishing 2015 and of Melodrama: Genre Style Sensibility (with Martin Shingler) Columbia University Press 2004.
Charlie Sarson is a PhD researcher in the Department of Art, Design and Media at Birmingham City University and is fully funded by the AHRC via the Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. Under the lens of queer theory, his research interests explore sex, gender, and sexuality, digital technologies, and performance theory.